This paper studies the effect of changes in foreign competition on the incentives faced by U.S. managers in the form of wage structures, promotion profiles, and job turnover. We use a panel of executives and measure foreign competition as import penetration. Using tariffs and exchange rates as...

The paper studies how high leverage and crises can arise as a result of changes in the income distribution. Empirically, the periods 1920-1929 and 1983-2007 both exhibited a large increase in the income share of the rich, a large increase in leverage for the remainder, and an eventual financial...

This Paper models aid agencies as financial intermediaries that do not make a financial return to depositors, since the depositors' concern is to transfer resources to investor-beneficiaries. This leads to a significant problem of verification of the agencies' activities. One solution to this...

The uniform pricing puzzle for vertically differentiated products states that a monopolist sells high and low quality products at the same price despite the fact that quality is perfectly observable and that there are no significant costs of adjusting prices. The puzzle is relevant for movies,...

We develop a theory of innovation for entry and sale into oligopoly, and show that an invention of higher quality is more likely to be sold (or licensed) to an incumbent due to strategic product market effects on the sales price. Preemptive acquisitions by incumbents are shown to stimulate the...

When will a monopolist have incentives to foreclose a complementary market by degrading compatibility/interoperability of his products with those of rivals? We develop a framework where leveraging extracts more rents from the monopoly market by 'restoring' second degree price discrimination. In...

We study competition between nonprofit providers supplying a collective service through increasing-returns-to-scale technologies. When providers adopt a not-for-profit mission, the absence of a residual claimant can impede entry, pro- tecting the position of an inefficient incumbent. Moreover,...

Ranking have become increasingly popular on markets for study programs, restaurants, wines, cars, etc. This paper analyses the welfare implication of such rankings. Consumers have to make a choice between two goods of unknown quality with exogenous presence or absence of an informative ranking....

Business services firms are increasingly under pressure from foreign competition. We develop an oligopolistic competition model that studies the effect of trade liberalization on exit and sectoral restructuring in the business services sector. We assume that firms are heterogeneous in their...

After some decades of relative oblivion, the interest in the optimality properties of monopolistic competition has recently re-emerged due to the availability of an appropriate and parsimonious framework to deal with firm heterogeneity. Within this framework we show that non-separable utility,...